Episode 125

There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, as the Coffee Song famously stated. An awful lot of corruption in the political class too. Almost every party has its leaders either on trial or awaiting trial. The one person not accused of any personal dishonesty is the president, Dilma Rousseff, so of course, in our topsy-turvy world, she’s the one that’s been thrown out of office. We invited Dr. Carolina Matos of City University aboard Sputnik this week to discuss the situation in Brazil, and we ask whether we are seeing the beginning of the end of a process in Latin America.

And this week 68 years ago, 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their land and homes and were never allowed to return. Hundreds of their towns and villages were destroyed and built over; thousands were massacred to make the others flee. As Palestinians mourn their Nakba, the day their country was wiped off the map and their people banished to the four corners of the earth as refugees, we discuss Britain’s authorship of this catastrophe and what the future holds for the 13 million displaced Palestinians with the academic and journalist, Yousef Alhelou.